Objectified Women With Stunts & Sovereigns
Some take on the role of the sister, opting for a committed, intellectual, even feminist discourse that frees them from the status of a sex doll.
The degradation of the image of women is also visually manifested. Pretty girls become signs of success and wealth that are flaunted, just like jewelry, stacks of cash, and luxury cars. Album covers are adorned with naked women. The typical example is 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989), the first album in history to be condemned for obscenity. It shows four women in thongs on a beach, standing, seen from behind, in front of the group members, all of whom are, of course, male. On this cult cover, self-mockery and juvenile humor are already evident, which will accompany a good part of the licentious rap, dirty rap, of which 2 Live Crew are the pioneers, and Akinyele, the eminent representative who in 1996 released the hit “Put It In Your Mouth” (put it in your mouth…), another prominent figure.
But this distance and this second degree are not always accepted and recognized, neither by rap’s detractors nor by some fans, nor even by some of its artists. Some want to take all of that at face value. The reduction of women to the status of sex objects is also manifested in the videos through which, in the era of music television channels and soon on the Internet, rappers illustrate their singles. In the clip for Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg’s “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” one of the great manifestos of the g-funk subgenre, a track that depicts a gangsta imagery of sun, luxury, and sensuality, we see a gangster on a joyride lowering the bra of a volleyball player.
Other videos even take on a frankly pornographic turn, such as one accompanying 2Pac’s “How Do U Want It,” a frenzy of images showing women in cages, in strip clubs, or in a jacuzzi, engaging in sapphic acts. As for Snoop Dogg, whose first album, recall, is titled Doggystyle (“in doggy style”), he dabbles in X-rated cinema, with Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle and Hustlaz Diary Of A Pimp. None of this is accidental. The success of rap is completely intertwined with that of mass pornography, and the two worlds often maintain relationships. The volleyball player whose chest is flaunted in Dr Dre’s clip is in fact Mercedes Ashley, an adult film actress. And the same is true for the women who, for 2Pac, engage in very hot encounters. It is also no accident that the dirty rap of 2 Live Crew was born in Miami, the capital of strip clubs and the porn industry, which offers a favorable ground for this style of hip-hop entirely centered on sex.
The trend only amplifies with the success, in the 2000s, of a festive and hedonistic rap from the southern United States, whose musical innovations are often born in nightclubs and strip clubs. With it, the very austere and cerebral New York rap gives way to music based on debauchery, the overflow of the senses, and the primacy of pleasure over morality. This is the case, for example, with the bounce style. Born in New Orleans at the end of the eighties, this very hot style popularizes a choreography, twerking, reserved for women (or even for transgender or transsexual people), which consists of frantically shaking the buttocks, with the torso bent, in an imitation of sexual intercourse. Having become popular, this dance horrifies part of America around 2010, when white stars like Iggy Azalea and Miley Cyrus indulge in it.
Faced with such an outburst of lewdness, some rappers wanted to set themselves apart. This is the case with Jeru the Damaja. In 1994, he released The Sun Rises In the East, a huge classic of New York rap. After the years of triumph of immoral and hedonistic Californian rap, this album is intended as a manifesto in favor of the East Coast. Seeking to distinguish himself from his rivals, the rapper then establishes, on the track “Da Bichez,” a distinction between stunts (the easy girls) and those respectable women whom he calls the sisters, or the queens. Jeru thus signs, without even realizing it (certain to defend the honor of Black women), one of the most sexist raps in history. When reading the lyrics, one sees that what bothers the rapper is the way in which some women use their charms to take advantage of their lovers and seize control of them. He perceives a risk to masculine domination. In the middle of the song, in the course of an odious verse, he even goes so far as to legitimize violence against these easy girls while paradoxically defending himself from being called misogynistic.
As essayist Tricia Rose observes, rap then confines itself to a trapped debate. Either the woman is reduced to the status of a sex object, or, under the pretext of giving her respect, she is asked to be a devoted sister, a loving mother, or a proper wife. The choice is between the mom and the whore; there are no alternatives. The rappers themselves oscillate between these two models. This is the case with 2Pac, who alternately expresses sympathy for abused women (his first single “Brenda’s Got a Baby”), absolute disdain for the opposite sex, and total reverence for his mother, the former Black Panther activist Afeni Shakur, to whom he dedicates the moving “Dear Mama,” a manifesto of filial piety that will inspire many others in hip-hop. When you are a rapper, you love your mom, but you often have nothing but contempt for your sexual partner, forgetting that you cannot be first without having been second.
These two models—the sister and the whore, the sista and the ho—are both dictated by men and, according to Tricia Rose, find their source in the patriarchal and religious values that dominate African-American working-class communities. They are the reason why it is so difficult for a woman to find her place in rap. Often she is confined to her cousin genre, R&B—the heir of the old African-American variety, where the traditional register of the lover expressing her romantic joys and heartbreaks dominates, without showing any real control over her love life. Starting in the nineties, as these two musical genres draw closer and merge, several become R&B icons for rappers, such as Mary J. Blige or Faith Evans, the wife of Notorious B.I.G. And it is not rare that, in a hip-hop collective, the role assigned to women is that of a singer, as with Blue Raspberry and Tekitha on the Wu-Tang Clan side.
And if women want to really try their hand at rap, they are forced either to mimic men to make the peculiarities of their sex fade into the background or to adopt one of the two models presented above. Some take on the role of the sister, opting for a committed, intellectual, even feminist discourse that frees them from the status of a sex doll. They then deliver a moral discourse, urging their fellow women to preserve their bodies and advocating temperance, as Nikki D did in 1991 on the track “Wasted Pussy” (spoiled pussy). But others, on the contrary and on a massive scale, openly identify as outright bitches. Rather than fighting prejudices, these women embrace them wholeheartedly. They appropriate them with pride, to excess, to absurdity. They follow a path parallel to that of gangsta rappers who, by preempting the worst clichés about African-Americans (that they are violent, drug-addicted, debauched, materialistic, and corrupt), contribute like no others to their advancement. They open a new prosperous era: that of the bad bitches.